It will soon be possible to experience in New York City the haunting atmosphere of the secret annexe, the warren of narrow, shadowy rooms where Anne Frank wrote her diary.

On Wednesday, the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the museum containing the annexe where Frank, her family and four other Jews took refuge from the Nazis, is to announce the winter opening of Anne Frank the Exhibition, which will feature the first full-scale re-creation of the hiding place on foreign soil.

The result of a partnership between the Anne Frank House and the Centre for Jewish History, the installation will open on January 27, 2025 — International Holocaust Remembrance Day — in the centre’s building on Union Square in Manhattan. On view till April 30, the show will replicate the cramped spaces that Frank and the others inhabited from July 1942 until August 1944, when the Nazis discovered them. Anne Frank, then 15, died several months later in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp; only Otto Frank, her father, survived the Holocaust.

“We are probably one of the most visited historical sites in Europe, and many people, 1.2 million visitors every year, come to see this place,” Ronald Leopold, the Anne Frank House’s executive director, said in a phone interview. “But we do realise that so many more people do not have the opportunity to travel to Amsterdam.” For those, he added, the New York show, for which tickets are now on sale online, “provides a connection to the story about Frank that has the same kind of emotional impact”.

Although the installation, which is expected to draw huge crowds, will be a meticulous reconstruction, it will differ in one important respect. While the Amsterdam annexe is empty, as Otto Frank wished — “It’s a place about absence,” Leopold said — the New York space will look lived in, including some furnishings once owned by the Franks before the war and recovered by Otto Frank afterwards.

“We feel that this will bring audiences who are not necessarily familiar with the story closer to that history and closer to Anne Frank,” he said.

The re-creation will also be more accessible, occupying one floor, with nonfunctioning stairs indicating the different levels of the real annexe.

The entire 7,500sqft exhibition will cover decades, including Frank’s early life in Frankfurt, the rise of the Third Reich and Otto Frank’s post-war years. Its multimedia elements include a floor-to-ceiling representation of life in Amsterdam in 1941 and a lighted glass floor that pinpoints the locations of mass killing sites during the Holocaust. (Although the design elements are adaptable to other venues, there are no plans yet for the show to travel.)

While Anne Frank’s handwritten diary remains in Amsterdam (published editions will be on view), the exhibition will display more than 100 other original artefacts. Some, like Frank’s first photo album and her best friend’s poetry journal, in which Frank wrote a piece of original verse, have never been exhibited in the US. The show will even have a New York connection: post-war correspondence between Otto Frank and students at a school in the Bronx.

“We know how important and relevant this history is,” Leopold said, adding, “regardless of who you are.”

New York Times News Service